What is Activity Diagram

What is Activity Diagram?

5-7 minutes

Activity diagram is another important behavioral diagram in UML diagram to describe dynamic aspects of the system. Activity diagram is essentially an advanced version of flowchart that modeling the flow from one activity to another activity.

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When to Use Activity Diagram

Activity Diagrams describe how activities are coordinated to provide a service which can be at different levels of abstraction. Typically, an event needs to be achieved by some operations, particularly where the operation is intended to achieve a number of different things that require coordination, or how the events in a single use case relate to one another, in particular, use cases where activities may overlap and require coordination. It is also suitable for modeling how a collection of use cases coordinate to represent business workflows

1. Identify candidate use cases, through the examination of business workflows
2. Identify pre- and post-conditions (the context) for use cases
3. Model workflows between/within use cases
4. Model complex workflows in operations on objects
5. Model in detail complex activities in a high level activity Diagram

Activity Diagram – Learn by Examples

A basic activity diagram – flowchart like

Activity Diagram – Modeling a Word Processor

The activity diagram example below describes the workflow for a word process to create a document through the following steps:

• Open the word processing package.
• Create a file.
• Save the file under a unique name within its directory.
• Type the document.
• If graphics are necessary, open the graphics package, create the graphics, and paste the graphics into the document.
• If a spreadsheet is necessary, open the spreadsheet package, create the spreadsheet, and paste the spreadsheet into the document.
• Save the file.
• Print a hard copy of the document.
• Exit the word processing package.